


To Want

by Achilles_Angst



Category: Lockwood and co
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-27
Updated: 2019-05-27
Packaged: 2020-03-20 13:35:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18993673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Achilles_Angst/pseuds/Achilles_Angst
Summary: Oh god there is more. I was ruthlessly encouraged by @wolfjawswriter soooo...here we are





	To Want

To want

Lockwood was not prepared for this. At all.

Love, for Antony J Lockwood, has been so far a rather familial road.  
He adored his family, and the grief at that loss cut him in two for such a long time. It still hurts, but he’s starting to learn to love them again, to cherish their memories.  
He has his new family to thank for that. George and Lucy. His best friends. The people he trusts most in the world. Lucy still reminds him of Jessica, but it doesn’t ache anymore.  
He loves her like a sister, and it doesn’t feel like he’s trying to replace Jessica, but rather as though he has gained a new one. They would have liked each other, he thinks. Despite their differences. That makes him happy, in a bittersweet way.  
It feels perfectly natural to give Lucy his mother’s necklace. She’s done so much in helping him be open about them. It makes him feel so much lighter, letting himself remember them without guilt or anger. His mother would have adored Lucy too. Both so determined and brave. 

George is his rock. The person he’d go to at three am if he’d been robbed and then beaten up. He is his oldest friend, and Lockwood loves him that way. Loves both of them that way, with a deep and genuine affection. 

Holly is a friend as well, and it’s nice. He doesn’t care about her quite the way he cares about George and Lucy, but that’s only time. Time and friendship and a forced introduction to health food.  
Flo... Flo is sort of like his gremlin cousin.  
She’s weird and elusive and petulant, and she’s family too, wether she likes it or not. She sort of reminds him of stitch, actually.

That sums up Lockwood’s total experience of affection. He loves, but he’s never wanted. Yet.

Quill Kipps is many things. Annoying. Persistent. Smug. But, he’s brave, Lockwood will give him that. He jumps into trouble with a kind of manic determination that Lockwood recognises. 

The trouble starts when he happens to notice his cheekbones.  
They’re good. Really good. Sharp and high and coated in freckles. 

After that it’s like some sort of switch has gone in his brain. 

He finds himself fascinated, hopelessly so, by his mouth. The disarming pinkness of it. The way a sharp canine snags into his bottom lip when Kipps is thinking, or about to make an icy retort.  
He wants things he was entirely unprepared for. He wants to taste that mouth, to catch that bottom lip between his teeth. To kiss him into breathless silence when he’s being purposefully irritating. To kiss him until his lips are numb.  
He wants, when he’s particularly annoyed with Kipps, to press him against a wall and hold him there, tease him until he’s frantic. He didn’t know anger and want could be so close, didn’t know that his anger would segue so far into desire.

He wants and wants and wants. It’s intoxicating and addictive and quite unlike anything else.  
He wants to feel their chests pressed together. He wants to slide his hands under the damned turtlenecks, feel the hot skin and muscles working beneath his fingers. He wants to kiss each collarbone, or bite them.  
He wants to know how far the freckles extend, whether they spread over shoulders and ribs and back like a cloak, and when they end. He wants to press his lips to each one.  
He wants to feel Quill’s weight against his. He wants to pin him down. He wants to be pinned. He wants to know what someone else’s heartbeat feels like.

He wants him so badly, like nothing else. He wishes someone had warned him about this earlier. Sat him down and said; 

just to warn you, one day your brain, previously perfectly functioning, will be entirely overrun by someone you weren’t expecting to be attracted to, and you will spend a worrying amount of time obsessing over their hands, say. You will know full well that it’s entirely pointless and one sided, but it’s unlikely to help anything. Sorry.

It might have been a comfort.  
Especially when Quill is reaching to grab something, pulling the hem of his turtleneck up to reveal the tantalising jut of a hipbone, covered by his jeans, and above it, a smooth sliver of pale skin, starred irregularly with freckles, that Lockwood wants to press his mouth to again and again and again.

He thinks George notices him watching, though he never says anything. Just regards him silently through his glasses. 

He wonders if he should mention anything to George and Lucy.  
He has no idea how that conversation would work though. It isn’t the sort of thing that they talk about.  
“ So, I like men, but I also like women and I’m honestly not sure about any of it, but I also think that Quill Kipps is bloody gorgeous. Any toast around?”  
He can’t really see it. 

It all goes a tad mad when he almost loses his head.  
They’re in an old and rather stately townhouse, and they’ve split up due to multiple, but reasonably easy, ghosts.  
Lucy and Holly are in the drawing room with some kind of weeping lady who keeps popping up and ghost touching servants, George is doing....something with silver wire and bells in an upstairs bedroom, which leaves him and Quill in the cellar with a lot of very expensive wine and the intriguing form of an old man, who can also throw bottles. 

Quill has been mostly staring with interest at the combination of a physical form and the ability to manipulate objects, and occasionally doing vaguely useful things with salt from inside their iron circle.  
Lockwood, on the other hand, is bored of waiting sensibly and wondering what the source is. It’s entirely possible it’s the whole wine cellar, which is going to make the current owner very unhappy if it proves to be the case.  
Quill turns up to him suddenly, goggles glinting in the lantern light.  
“ He only takes bottles from one section. Reckon the source is there?” 

Lockwood considers it quickly. Quill is likely right, so...

“ I’ll look for it. You cover me.” Quill nods briefly, hand tightening on his rapier. The space entirely rules out flares and salt bombs, so Quill will have to rely on his rapier. 

To Lockwood’s considerable relief, it goes fine. He soon notices the button on the inside of a shelf, and Quill is more than adept at keeping the ghost at bay.  
The button causes a smallish cubbyhole to be revealed. He reaches into the depths and snags a heavy glass bottle. 

He pulls it out in triumph just as Quill roars “Move!”, and his weight shoves him hard to the side as a broken bottle with edges like knives slams into the section of shelving where the base of his skull was a minute before. 

Lockwood’s back connects solidly with the stone floor, and is promptly doubly squashed by Quill landing on top of him and dropping a silver glass net over the bottle Lockwood’s still holding in one long motion.  
His ears pop as the ghost vanishes.  
Quill shifts, shoving his goggles up his forehead and bracing his arms on the floor so he’s supporting a lot of his own weight, which brings his face suddenly very close to his. 

Time does a strange thing where it goes slow and thick and treacly, and Lockwood’s brain cannot move past the fact that the barest motion would bring their lips into full contact. Never has such a small distance mattered so much.

Seemingly unconsciously, Quill catches his lip with his teeth. A small and slightly hysterical part of his brain mutters, he must be thinking. Or maybe he isn’t thinking at all. Maybe he, too, is thinking about mouths. Maybe...

“Lockwood?” Lucy’s voice echos down the cellar steps, and they both leap apart as though they’ve been caught doing something wrong, which makes no sense because they didn’t do anything. Did they?

The air seems fraught as they sit in the taxi, especially when Quill folds his leg over his knee, seemingly oblivious that his foot is now brushing Lockwood’s leg.  
Lockwood sits, trying not to shift and trying to focus on the story Lucy is telling, laughing opposite him. By the end of the journey, he still hasn’t worked out the plot line, and he can feel the weight of Quill’s boot resting against him and god but he just wants to touch him.

Quill announces that he’ll sleep on the sofa, if no-one objects, it being 1 a.m. Lockwood absently agrees, torn between wanting to retreat back into his room or staying in the same space, letting himself imagine that he could reach out and have his touch reciprocated. Alarmed by the rush of desire, he turns away and heads upstairs, nodding a goodnight to a yawning Lucy.  
Mechanically, he showers, brushes his teeth, then collapses into bed and resolutely reads the Hello magasine instead of thinking, until he drops into an exhausted sleep.

He dreams, perhaps unsurprisingly of freckles and scars and a bitten lip, but when he wakes he remembers only the sense of that indefinable quality of dreaming of something you want and can’t have. 

He sits up in bed, listless. When he pulls open the curtains, the light the window brings is pearly and dreamlike with the beginning of dawn, a lavender grey wash of bare colour. The clock says 6, barely.  
The house is still and silent, transformed by the quiet and by the strange pre-dawn light. Unable to sleep, he drifts down the stairs, feeling oddly out of place, the familiarity of his house distant in its unawakened state.

The reason he is going downstairs at this hour is unclear even to to him, but he just wants...something. He thinks in that cellar he might have started something, or missed something vital that he needs. He thinks of Quill’s boot, how unaware he seemed of it’s presence, how the weight had settled against him, keeping him caught there, not daring to move lest he brush his leg against him. He missed something, and he needs to find out what it was. 

Quill is sitting in the kitchen like he knew he was coming, a mug beside him where he’s sat on the edge of the counter. He turns to him as the door swings closed, and Lockwood sees the way his hair is rumpled where he’s been sleeping on it, sees his face and finds that want has become need.  
He steps forward again and again until they are close enough to touch and then stops, suddenly entirely unsure, and wondering if he just made a massive mistake. Quill huffs very quietly and slips to his feet, tea abandoned and so very close.  
Cautiously, Lockwood barely moves his hand, the air so still that even raising his hand seems a disturbance.

Against his fingers, there is the lightest brush of skin and then a hand wraps around his and Quill murmurs against him  
“Are you going to wait for a written invitation or...” And Lockwood leans forward and kisses him. This is what he missed, he thinks, sliding a hand down his back. This is what he wanted so badly.  
And it was worth it. He wants this to last forever, as Quill wraps his arms around his neck, as he presses him back against the counter, feeling like he is drowning and flying all at once.  
This is what it is to want, he thinks, this feeling. He lets himself fall into it, wants to catch everything, every movement and touch.

Quill pulls back, arms still looped around him and gives him a kind of lopsided smile which Lockwood obviously has to kiss, and as their lips brush again he thinks maybe wanting might not be so bad after all


End file.
